The present invention relates to a paper sheet feeding apparatus for a copying device, which has a manual paper sheet feeding device and an automatic paper sheet feeding device.
A typical example of a conventional paper sheet feeding apparatus is shown schematically in FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, the automatic paper sheet feeding device comprises a feeding roll 1 and a paper sheet cassette 3. In operation, the roll 1 and a pair of registration rolls 2 are driven alternately, i.e., first the feeding roll 1 which contacts the uppermost paper sheet of the paper sheet stack 4 in the cassette 3 is driven to send the uppermost sheet to the registration rolls 2, and then the driving of the feeding roll 1 is stopped and the registration rolls 2 are driven to send the paper sheet to a transfer portion of a photosensitive drum 5 included in the copying machine.
The manual feeding device comprises a manual sending table 6 and a manual feeding roll 7. Paper sheets are sent one by one from the manual sending table 6 to the manual feeding rolls 7 through which the paper sheets are fed to the registration rolls 2. The sheets are then moved from the registration rolls 2 to the photosensitive drum 5 one by one with a suitable timing.
In the conventional apparatus such as shown in FIG. 1, since both the manual feeding rolls 7 and the automatic feeding rolls 1 are normally driven, the paper sheets 4 in the cassette 3 may be fed even when the manual paper sheet feeding device is in operation. In order to avoid this inconvenience, it has commonly been necessary to remove the cassette 3 from the copying machine when the manual operation is selected. This is very troublesome.